How to counter spam

Some practical advice and tools

This site is about steps users of the Internet and server administrators may take to counter spam. Methods and tools presented here should be considered in addition to what users and administrators might be using already, eg. rejecting messages coming from hosts on various black lists (DNSBL - osirusoft, dorkslayers, ordb, etc), blocking messages recognized as spam by various email analysis programs (spamassassin, mimedefang, etc).

The first section explains why the amount of spam is growing, and why we should expect it to grow further and further. It also expresses doubts regarding effectiveness of various parliamentary bills and governmental regulations against spam.

The second section contains some advice on methods and tools that might help in making the spammers' life a bit more difficult, i.e. forcing them to spend more resources and efforts to spam than before. The methods and tools range from a simple advice not to respond to any spam messages through to a fully developed and tested Personal Email Filter that may be deployed by server administrators for use by their users.

The third section - tools - provides access to a few web tools that may be used on this site instantly and/or fetched and installed on other servers.

The fourth section - downloads - is where the tools may be fetched from. All of them are free to be used by anybody for any purpose. Visitor Verification Script and Personal Email Filter are free under GNU GPL, while others are not covered by any licence at all.

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